Linux Server Administration and Website Development

Linux server administration

Dotdeb is a repository of extra packages for Debian. Dotdeb has newer versions of Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis and other server software than you’d find in the official Debian repos. The instructions provided on Dotdeb tell you how to install various versions of PHP and MySQL but they don’t tell you how to install only Nginx. Here’s how you can do that.

A hash function takes arbitrary sized data and outputs a number in a fixed range. It always outputs the same number for the exact same data. If the data changes by even one bit the hash also changes. Hashes are used to ensure data integrity by creating “fingerprints” of data.

SFTP is a secure alternative to FTP. Authentication is done via SSH and a secure tunnel is established for the entire file transfer session. In this article I look at how to restrict a user’s access to SFTP only and to a specific directory on the server.